I am holding out for a professional position where I will work 24-32 hours per week with benefits. I am not doing the full-time "you own me" rodeo again.
"Sorry but I'm working with another client right now I will get back to you"
You bill more per hour; you bill less than 40 hrs/wk; you get higher pay but have to pay full cost of insurance; it averages out. Then there's the other issue where the pay for some technology positions is so high that even if I only got half pay I'd still be pretty well off in general life ...
My long term experience is people say they like working less than 40/wk but in practice everyone seems more happy with work 80 this week and near 0 next week depending on workload. If the company had precisely 40/wk of work to do every week then they'd skip the contract hassle and hire a feudal peon aka full time "long term" W-2 employee, but contractors provide day to day flexibility.
At companies that are more successful than median, they don't outsource their core competencies so you won't get contractor positions to do "rockstar" revenue generating stuff, but they still need temps to do conversion projects or expansions or experiments. At companies less successful then median, they will outsource their core competencies so you could contract program at a below average software company. My point is its easy and common to get unusual side background unseen work at great companies, and only be in the middle of things at failing companies, so if you want a different combination, like being a rockstar at the center of a great company, you generally have to be a W-2, sadly. Then again there's a lot of money to be made under the contractor model.
a) Dependence on recruiters/headhunters who take a cut (20-50%+ of your 1099 income)
b) A strong, solid network so broad as to always have leads and offers to keep you busy throughout the year, year after year
c) A giant's reputation: you're well-known elite in one of the FAANGs and built something a lot of people use; you've published books or make speeches at conferences. You're the inventor of some open source tool everyone uses.
Since c is out of my range, I attempted b and find I didn't have that type of skill (or energy) to schmooze and booze my way to a vast network. My past connections from previous jobs are OK, but reasonably loose and they tend to hail from large corporations where there's no contract possibility for my skillset anyway.
I was left with A, which meant that I didn't truly feel independent, but also in the last 3 months of my contracts I would be scrambling and not exactly able to take those 3 months or 6 months off to travel the world like I dreamt. Instead there are lease renewal, healthcare (in the U.S.), and other headaches.
I'm happy to be proven wrong or be offered a "d" option.
Get a full time remote job from a company that treats their employees like adults. You can easily get whatever their equivalent of a "meets expectations" rating is on 4-5 hours of work a day. And ethically you're doing nothing wrong, because the company is formally saying it's satisfied with your work which means they're getting what they bargained for.
It has to be official from now on. There is going to be no potential for a slippery slope of after-hours messages or pizza party overtime. I have even set up a VoIP number with a 9-5 M-F time condition for use with applications and employers.
I don't have it in me to to work in front of a screen all day, although I understand that works for many on this site. I don't care if the workplace is an open office, a cashier's stool at a supermarket checkout, or a train driver's cab.
We don't pay firemen to put out as many huge fires as possible all day long, because that would lead to very peculiar and unwanted behavior incentives to max out those metrics. Firemen hiring pyromaniacs to make them look good, etc.
Plenty of jobs out there where the metric you're trying to maximize is internal/external customer satisfaction, usually something like maximize service uptime. If your assigned responsibility is the accounting dept, and the accounting dept loves you because when they report a problem its rapidly fixed, then you're doing what the company needs.
Some companies refuse to metric stuff like implementing change, because it results in I (heart) change for the sake of change. I quickly close a ticket to tweak the background color on an internal app but that doesn't make the company any money.
There are jobs like mining coal or farm work, where paying you to not produce makes the owners very angry. Sometimes being in a non-productive cost-center has its privileges. "You're paying me so IT is never in the way of production dept" or IT never gets in the way of accounting so accounting never gets in the way of the production dept, etc.
Big industrial factories usually have a maint department whom do nothing but fix machines. If none of the machines are fixed you don't punish the maint dept LOL. Usually they have pointless busywork if nothing else is going on "go repaint the milling machine". Such things exist in IT "go update the reverse DNS records".
This is an interesting ethics question that has crossed my mind a lot. I also remember an internet post years ago about someone who had automated 95% of their job and kept it a secret from their employer, who continued to be satisfied with their output. Where do you draw the line?
It always depends on bargain and deal conditions. And KPIs.
When swe work conditions discussion reaches this point I always remember Spolsky's brilliant "Smart and Gets Things Done" book. He writes about KPIs a bit, just enough to not treating it too seriously.
If I were employing that person and found out about this I would promote them to an executive position… that is if the work was good and they were doing it successfully.
Thank you for helping normalize it. I get bored of companies being insistent that they want "smart", "data driven" people who will nonetheless ignore the research to everyone's detriment.
I've been making sacrifices, bettering myself, and applying to jobs at a relaxed pace (I have turned down a few that insisted that things would be done the Old Way). Thank God that I am in the relatively luxurious position to do so.
Just now I've noticed that downvotes have started to pour in. I am convinced that there is a troll army from a foreign nation-state sent to sow discord, or maybe the Pinktertons, who still have a sophisticated union-busting intelligence group, and get paid tons of money for it by "Great Place To Work" companies you might not expect.
"Sorry but I'm working with another client right now I will get back to you"
You bill more per hour; you bill less than 40 hrs/wk; you get higher pay but have to pay full cost of insurance; it averages out. Then there's the other issue where the pay for some technology positions is so high that even if I only got half pay I'd still be pretty well off in general life ...
My long term experience is people say they like working less than 40/wk but in practice everyone seems more happy with work 80 this week and near 0 next week depending on workload. If the company had precisely 40/wk of work to do every week then they'd skip the contract hassle and hire a feudal peon aka full time "long term" W-2 employee, but contractors provide day to day flexibility.
At companies that are more successful than median, they don't outsource their core competencies so you won't get contractor positions to do "rockstar" revenue generating stuff, but they still need temps to do conversion projects or expansions or experiments. At companies less successful then median, they will outsource their core competencies so you could contract program at a below average software company. My point is its easy and common to get unusual side background unseen work at great companies, and only be in the middle of things at failing companies, so if you want a different combination, like being a rockstar at the center of a great company, you generally have to be a W-2, sadly. Then again there's a lot of money to be made under the contractor model.